Talk:Francis Brett Young
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
Surname
editHis surname was Brett Young, not Young. Monk Bretton 11:55, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
- Does anyone have a source to back that up? because the usage in:
- the project gutenberg list of authors
- Michael Hall FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG’S BIRMINGHAM NORTH BROMWICH – CITY OF IRON A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY (2007)
- does not back up that statement. PBS (talk) 01:46, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
- No, but I have sources to back you up, PBS. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Catalog of Copyright Entries, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The National Union Catalog, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary and The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English all list him under Y for Young. If nobody comes up with some evidence that his surname was Brett Young in the next few days then I'll amend this article. --Antiquary (talk) 16:04, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Done --Antiquary (talk) 10:44, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Name
editAny relation to the writer Bret Harte, whose full name was Francis Brett Harte? Francis Brett seemed to be a name passed on through the family, and Harte spent a good deal of time in England. Just wondering. Manannan67 (talk) 04:53, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Photo
editPretty sure that, for a novelist, showing off their photo from when they were 2 is kind of not really helpful Ummunmutamnag (talk) 19:03, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Notability of individual works
editIt's not clear to me how many of the individual novels have standalone notability, but in their current state, they almost all simply refer to the page in Hall (1997) where the novel is mentioned, with some of them having additional mentions in other works, like Stevenson (2013), with those being passing mentions.
Some may have individual notability with multiple contemporary book reviews, such as for Wistanslow in 1956, but for others it's less clear. Current sourcing in these articles is not sufficient to establish notability. Mathglot (talk) 16:49, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
I tend to agree with User:GreenC's comment here. If what you are concerned with is findability, then it would be sufficient to add a few dozen redirects to the Young bio from the novel titles, and then anyone searching for one of the articles would find their way to Francis Brett Young#Main works. Speaking of which, that section is entirely unreferenced (with the exception of The Red Knight, via a WP:BAREURL), and the Hall (1997) source that you've placed in each of the individual stubs could simply be added to the individual entries in the Young article. What does a reader actually gain, by clicking through the link in #Main works, to view one of the stub articles? Not much, other than the defining sentence ("FOO is a <year> novel by The the British writer Francis Brett Young.") and an unsourced one- or two-sentence synopsis. For example for The Red Knight, they get this:
Robert Bryden, a young art student in Chelsea befriends a communist revolutionary who then succeeds in launching a revolution in his Mediterranean homeland. Bryden travels out to assist him but quickly becomes disillusioned when the regime persecutes a woman he has fallen in love with.
but that is entirely unsourced and apparently original research, as a targeted search for unique bits of that fails to turn up anything at all relevant.
The majority of these articles are Wikipedia:Permastubs, and unlikely ever to be expanded into an article. In their current state, even if the individual book topic is notable (which isn't a given), notability is not necessarily sufficient to meet the threshhold of a stand-alone article. Another option, would be to create List of novels of Francis Brett Young, and include your synopses there. Then, you would no longer be facing the notability issue of the individual novels, as the content in a list article does *not* have to be notable; only the list topic itself does. Although the majority of "List of novels by XYZ" articles are redirects back to the XYZ biography article, not all are; see for example, List of novels by George Harmon Coxe, List of works by Harold Pinter, or List of works by Arnold Bennett. Mathglot (talk) 17:54, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
- Two out of three editors agree we should create "List of novels" article and merge/redirect all novels to it. @Lord Cornwallis: if you disagree we would need open a formal merge discussion; hard to say what will result from that but I know some editors would respond with an AfD and others would by finding sources. In any case it goes outside of all our control, it would be faster and easier to work something out here if we can. Not all of the novels need to be merged, see which one's make sense right now to Keep, merge the rest then spin off to standalone if/when they have sufficient sourcing and material. Not every novel by Brett Young is inherently notable, and not every source used in these articles is SIGCOV that meets GNG. -- GreenC 18:19, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
- Interesting points, but I have to reiterate what I have said earlier. FBY was a major, bestselling author in the interwar years. I'd add I haven't ready any of his works (although I've seen several of the film adaptations) and have no particular attachment to him personally. He is obscure now, but he will have been widely reviewed in his time and has several biographies written about him. We can exercise a degree of recentism. I think it would clarify which articles are being proposed to be merged and which kept separate, because I'm open to merging some for now.Lord Cornwallis (talk) 21:08, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
- I've started List of novels of Francis Brett Young and encourage anyone to help. The text is 100% copies nothing lost except for redundant intros. The cover images might go into a gallery last step. -- GreenC 02:06, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
- Interesting points, but I have to reiterate what I have said earlier. FBY was a major, bestselling author in the interwar years. I'd add I haven't ready any of his works (although I've seen several of the film adaptations) and have no particular attachment to him personally. He is obscure now, but he will have been widely reviewed in his time and has several biographies written about him. We can exercise a degree of recentism. I think it would clarify which articles are being proposed to be merged and which kept separate, because I'm open to merging some for now.Lord Cornwallis (talk) 21:08, 17 May 2021 (UTC)